To the Land of the Living Read online

  “No?”

  “What was that line you used? ‘Just to do my own thing’? I like that. My own thing. Which was for me, as for you, to be a king; but that was a long time ago, in another life. Here I have no interest in it. What is there to rule, here? This land of trickery and sorcery, where places come and go as though in dreams, and time itself flows fast or slow according to some demon’s whim?” Gilgamesh spat. “No, Herod, you mistake me if you think I would be king again! Let me rove freely, let me hunt where I will. And let me find again my one beloved companion, whom I have lost in this land of the Afterworld as I lost him once in the land of the living. Let me be reunited with Enkidu my true brother, the friend of my heart, who is the only one I have ever loved, and that is all I require. Let others be the kings here. While the likes of you and me do our own thing.” Gilgamesh grinned and slapped Herod broadly on the back, knocking the little man up hard against the rail. “Eh, Herod? I think we have more in common, you and I, than it seemed at first. Is that not so, King Herod? Is that not so?”

  The mainland and the louring fury of all its roaring, sputtering volcanoes dropped away aft and the royal yacht slipped gracefully through the gleaming water toward Brasil. The city stood large before them now. Green ghost-fires danced on its many-towered walls.

  Gilgamesh felt a faint flicker of excitement. It was the merest shadow of his ancient curiosity, that world-devouring hunger for knowledge and adventure that in his first life had sent him roving everywhere within the confines of the Land and far beyond it. Once the bards of Sumer and Akkad had sung of him as the man to whom all things had been made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death. They hadn’t been so far from wrong, those long-ago singers. He had wanted to know everything, to see everything, to taste everything, to do everything.

  Most of that was gone from him now, burned out of his soul in the thousands of years he had spent roving this immense and incomprehensible place after death that was known as the Afterworld. But some fragment of the old vanished Gilgamesh must yet remain alive within him; or else why did he stare so intently at the bizarre island-city that rose glittering before him out of the phosphorescent sea?

  “Make ready for landing!” someone shouted. “All hands make ready!”

  Herod disappeared below decks. Crewmen sprang from nowhere, half a dozen little oily-looking Levantine types who ran around doing busy things with lines and capstans. Surprisingly, a Hairy Man emerged from the depths of the boat: squat, thick-bodied, heavy-jawed, with hardly any chin and great jutting brows. He was wearing Roman costume. They turned up in the most unlikely places, those harsh-voiced beings out of the dawn of time, from that lost and forgotten world before the Flood. This one appeared to be in the service of Simon, judging by his dress and the gaudy decorations he was wearing.

  Simon Magus himself came out next, moving slowly, leaning on Herod’s arm. It was plain that the dictator of Brasil was a man much given to the excesses of the body; and yet you could see the force of his spirit within the flab and behind the blotches, you could see the iron strength of soul, the unwavering hunger for power. That hunger had survived Simon’s own life. How sad it was, Gilgamesh thought, that a man of Simon’s caliber was unable to transcend his own lustful appetites. Gilgamesh knew something about appetite himself, and about lust and excess; but he had never allowed it to show on the surface the way this man did. His body was his temple and throughout his life he had kept it holy. And throughout his long death-life too.

  “Ah,” Simon said. “The king of Uruk. Well, there’s Brasil, just a few hundred yards off our bow. Your first glimpse of my little city. What do you think of it, Gilgamesh?”

  “It is not without merit,” said Gilgamesh.

  “Not without merit? Is that the best you can say of it, king of Uruk? Not without merit?” Simon’s red blotches deepened to angry scarlet. Then, in a softer, more diplomatic tone, he said, “But of course my Brasil is as nothing beside your great capital. I understand that.”

  “Your city is most splendid,” Gilgamesh said.

  In truth he had almost begun to forget the look of Uruk in all this time. The details of construction and design were going from him; about all he remembered were general outlines, low brick buildings with flat roofs, narrow streets, a temple high upon a platform of whitewashed brick.

  This Brasil was a place of narrow spires set with bands of precious stones, parapets that went curving off at improbable angles, boulevards that wound in eye-baffling zigs and zags up the slopes of the lava-rimmed mountain that dominated the island. A strange-looking place indeed, no doubt transformed greatly over time from the simple old Roman town after which it had been originally modeled. Nothing stayed the same in the Afterworld for very long. Not even the mountains and rivers.

  Simon said, “My prime minister, the Jew Herod.”

  “We have met,” said Gilgamesh.

  So Herod, for all his pious disclaimer of interest in power, nevertheless was prime minister in Brasil? Well, perhaps that was his way of—what was the phrase he had used?—doing his own thing. Let others be the kings here, he had said, but nevertheless he had managed to worm his way into a high enough position among these Romans. Gilgamesh was reminded of that Mongol, Kublai Khan, whom he had encountered while he was wandering the kingdoms of the Outback. The tale was that Kublai in his time on Earth had been one of the grandest of emperors; but here he claimed to have no imperial ambitions and avowed himself quite content to serve as minister of war for Mao Tse-tung’s Celestial People’s Republic. Which was easier than being an emperor, no doubt: but it was still a position of power.

  It seemed that your life on Earth determined the way you lived here. Perhaps it was so. Mountains and rivers might be in constant flux and transition here, but human souls, so it seemed, never really changed. Look at all those Romans and Carthaginians, off there somewhere still fighting and refighting their absurd little Punic Wars. Or that little man Lenin, feverishly launching plot and crazy counterplot in his endless pointless insurrection against whoever it was that claimed currently to be the head of government in Nova Roma. And all the kings and emperors trying to replicate their ancient realms in this other world, Caesar and Mao and Elizabeth and Prester John and the rest. Even those like Herod and Kublai who claimed to have renounced the lust for power tended to turn up somehow among those who gave the orders rather than among those who obeyed them.

  No, Gilgamesh thought, no one ever truly changes in the Afterworld. Except me. Except me. I was the king of all the Land, and gloried in my mastery, and made all men bow to me. I conquered cities; I erected temples; I built walls and canals. Here I have done nothing for untold thousands of years but hunt and roam, roam and hunt, and it has been sufficient for me. Whether they will believe it or no, it has been sufficient.

  “And this,” said Simon, “is my grand mage and high wizard, whose name, of course, I am unable to tell you.”

  He indicated the Hairy Man.

  “Peace and gladness, king of Uruk,” said the Hairy Man. Or so Gilgamesh heard him to say. He had never had an easy time understanding the speech of those peculiar folk. Like nearly everyone else here now they spoke English, and before that they had spoken Latin when Latin was the main language of the Afterworld; but whatever language they spoke, they spoke it in a deep, gruff, furry, all but incomprehensible way, as though speaking through a thick stack of oxhides and as though their tongues were attached the wrong way. Perhaps they spoke their own language that way too.

  The Hairy Men were mysteries to Gilgamesh. They had no names, or at least none that they would tell to anyone not of their own kind. They worshipped gods without names, too. They looked almost like beasts, covered as they were with dense coarse shaggy pelts of brown—or, more usually, reddish—fur. Enkidu was famed among men for his rough thick-haired body, but even he, shaggy as he was, seemed nearly as hairless as a woman beside a Hairy Man. Bestial though they looked and sounded, however, they conducted themselves as men among
men, and when you spent a little time with them you quickly came to see that they were shrewd and wise, with deep cunning and a mastery of many arcane skills.

  The tale was that they came from the beginning of time, in those early days before the Flood, when the kingship of men first descended from heaven. Maybe so. But once when Gilgamesh had questioned one about those days, asking him what he knew of Alulim the first king who had reigned at holy Eridu, or Alalgar his successor, or En-men-lu-Anna who had been king after him with his capital at the city of Bad-tibira, the Hairy Man had simply shaken his head.

  “These are only names,” the Hairy Man had said. “Names are nothing.”

  “They are kings! Alulim was king for 28,800 years! Alalgar for 36,000! In Bad-tibira En-men-lu-Anna ruled for 43,200 years! Every boy learns of them in school. And you who lived before the Flood, you who come from deepest antiquity—how could you not know the names of the kings?”

  “They were not kings to me,” the Hairy Man had replied indifferently. “They were never. They were nothing.” Or so he seemed to be saying, in his thick-tongued indistinct way. And when Gilgamesh had asked other Hairy Men about the same matters, the answers that he got from them were always the same.

  Well, perhaps they had forgotten. It was such a long time, after all. Before the Flood! Or could it be that the Hairy Men were not men at all, but demons native to this other world? Nowhere in the books that Gilgamesh had studied when he was king in Uruk had he ever seen it said that in the days before the Flood men had looked like beasts. A mystery, yes. Maybe while he was in Brasil he would attempt to learn more on these matters from this wizard of Simon’s.

  Looking shoreward Gilgamesh beheld slaves bustling around at the pier, some waving flags to guide the royal yacht into its slip, others unrolling an astonishingly long magenta carpet for Simon. A trio of gunners detonated bright smoke-bombs, perhaps as a salute to the returning monarch and perhaps just to scare off the evil-looking winged creatures with scaly yellow necks and long glistening fangs that flew in wild circles, flapping and screaming over the harbor.

  Simon said, “Magnificent, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed.”

  “You’ve heard of me, have you?”

  “In truth, Simon, never at all,” said Gilgamesh.

  Simon Magus looked displeased, but only for an instant. “You’re honest, at any rate. And it’s just as well. Most of what you would have heard of me is lies, anyway.”

  “Indeed?” said Gilgamesh again.

  “That I was the father of all heresy. That I went to Rome and performed miracles in front of the Emperor Claudius. That I said I was the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and that I announced I would be transported to Heaven and was actually in mid-air when Saints Peter and Paul knelt and prayed and brought me down with a smash against the pavement. All lies, you know. Also the one about my having myself buried alive, saying that I would rise on the third day, the way he did. All lies.”

  “I have no doubt of that.”

  Simon chuckled. “Sorcery, yes. I admit to that. I did magic to a fare-thee-well. But miracles? And heresy? No, Gilgamesh, never. I saw right away that Jesus of Bethlehem had magic better than mine, magic of tremendous power, and I went right over to his side. I was always loyal to him—made sense, you understand, complete and utter sense, throw in your lot with the best wizard and don’t try to compete. That was in Samaria, you know—were you ever there? A lovely place, near Jerusalem—but I was never in Rome, not once. Pompeii, yes, I was there, that’s why I designed Brasil to look the way Pompeii did. But not Rome, and I never knew Claudius, and he never put up a statue in my honor in the Tiber, or any of that.” Shaking his head, Simon said, “They also said that I found Helen of Troy reincarnated in a Roman brothel, and offered her salvation if she would be my mistress. Nothing to it. Do you know Helen, Gilgamesh? Have you ever met her?”

  “Never,” said Gilgamesh.

  “I did, once, long ago, at a place called Theleme. And we had a good laugh over that one. I’d love to find her again someday. But I want you to know, my friend, it was some other Simon who played all those games with false miracles, long after I was dead. I was only interested in power—and therefore sorcery, and religion, since those are the ways to power. Jesus, though—he was the best sorcerer of them all. Next to him I was nothing.” Simon, smiling, gestured broadly toward the city they were approaching. “Brasil! There she is! And we’ll allow ourselves a few days to rest and enjoy the baths, yes, king of Uruk? A feast, a theatrical show, a circus in your honor with a hundred gladiators. And then we must get down to business, and discuss the expedition to find the kingdom that by rights is yours.”

  Gilgamesh frowned. “But I covet no—”

  Herod nudged him quickly to silence.

  “What’s that you say, great king?” Simon asked.

  He needed no further warnings from Herod. “I said, How good it will be to enjoy your baths, Simon. The feasting, the theatricals, the gladiators.”

  “And then to search for your city of Uruk, eh?”

  Gilgamesh made no reply. Serenely the royal yacht glided into its slip. Swarms of slaves and sycophants rushed forward to greet Simon.

  To search for Uruk, Gilgamesh thought. What Uruk? Where? Uruk was lost in the swirling mists of time. There would never be another Uruk. What he wanted was Enkidu, carried off or perhaps even slain by whoever it was that had attacked van der Heyden’s caravan. He would accept Simon’s help in finding Enkidu, yes. But Uruk? Uruk? All that was craziness.

  “You will enjoy our circus,” said Herod at his side. “In your honor we will send the hundred mightiest gladiators of Brasil to their next lives.”

  Gilgamesh gave him a sour look. “That matters little to me. Why should a hundred heroes die for my amusement? You Romans and your bloody games—”

  “Please,” said Herod. “You keep calling me a Roman, but actually I prefer to think of myself as a Jew, you know. Although technically I suppose I could be thought of as a Roman—Julius Caesar did make my great-grandfather Antipater a Roman citizen, after all—but we Jews have a far more ancient lineage than the Romans, after all, and—”

  “Do you ever stop running off at the mouth, even for a minute?” Gilgamesh burst out.

  “Have I given offense, great king?”

  “This chatter of Jews and Romans, Romans and Jews. Who gives a demon’s fart about you or your lineage? I was a king when your land was nothing but a swamp!”

  Herod smiled. “Ah, Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, forgive me! Of course your nation is far older than Rome, or even Judaea. But then again, there are others here to whom even grand and glorious Sumer is but a recent event.” He looked slyly toward the Hairy Man. “Under the specter of Eternity, Gilgamesh, most of us have been in the Afterworld only an hour or two. Next to him, that is. But forgive me. Forgive me. I do speak too much. Nevertheless I urge you to attend the contests in our coliseum. And I bid you welcome to my adopted city of Brasil, King Gilgamesh. Both as Roman and as Jew do I bid you be welcome here.”

  * * *

  EIGHT

  IN Brasil Gilgamesh took up residence in Simon’s palace, a huge rambling building laid out around a courtyard and set in an enormous walled garden. His suite had a bath in the Roman style, a vast circular bed that somehow seemed to float in mid—air, and its own staff of valets, butlers, courtesans, and porters to meet his every need. Just at the moment he felt very few needs, a general austerity having been his mode for more years than he could remember. But it was good to know those comforts were there, he supposed.

  Herod came to him in early evening, when the murky glow of the sun was beginning to tint the garden with the deep purples of twilight. He perched casually on a windowsill and said, “Tell me about this Uruk of yours.”

  “What can I tell? It was a city long ago, where I was born and lived and was king and—died. The River Buranunu ran along its flank. Enlil was the god of the city and Inanna its goddess, and—”

  “No.
I mean the new Uruk, that is here in the Afterworld.”

  “I know nothing of any such city,” said Gilgamesh.

  Herod studied him closely. “Simon thinks you do.”

  “He does? Whatever I know of the new Uruk, which is very little, I’ve learned from Simon.”

  “Ah. I begin to see.”

  “The first I heard of it,” Gilgamesh said, “was when I encountered Simon across the bay in the land of the flaming mountains. There is a city called Uruk in the Afterworld, he told me. He told me that this Uruk is a city much like the city of my life, and there are people of my kin there. This Uruk, he said, is a city of fabulous wealth and enormous treasure.”

  “Yes. The true picture does come into focus now,” said Herod.

  “He asked if I would join him in an expedition to Uruk. His soldiers, he said, are bored and seek adventure.”

  “And also he seeks treasure.”

  “The treasure of Uruk?”

  “Any treasure,” Herod said. “Have you looked at the walls and towers of this city? He’s encrusted Brasil with emeralds and rubies and sapphires and diamonds. And gems the names of which no one knows, which were never seen on Earth but are found only in the Afterworld. His appetite for fancy baubles is enormous. Enormous. Five wizards conjure more stones into existence for him all day long and all the night; but of course those stones last only a short while. He craves the genuine article. If Uruk has great treasure, Simon hungers for it.”

  “I took him for a wiser man.”

  “There is much wisdom in him. But this is the Afterworld, Gilgamesh, where the decay of time turns wise men to folly. He loves bright stones.”

  “There were no stones at all in Uruk,” Gilgamesh pointed out. “We built our city from bricks made of mud. We had neither emeralds nor rubies.”

  “That was your Uruk. Simon means to find the Afterworld’s Uruk. He thinks you know the way.”

  “I told him that I did not.”

  “He thinks you lie,” said Herod amiably.